Jackie Andres is a Chicago-based fiber artist and filmmaker. She explores the relationships between collection, documentation, and material culture. Her artwork embraces the presence of hand by using tactile and repetitive analog processes such as screen printing, sewing, and analog film montage. Jackie studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she will receive her BFA in 2022.

 www.jackieandres.com

Piña Fiber and the Barong Tagalog: Recontextualizing Nationalism and Refashioning Identities

Chelsea Bighorn was born and raised in Tempe, Arizona, and her tribal affiliations are the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribes from Montana and the Shoshone-Paiute from Northern Nevada. Coming from a mixed race background, Bighorn's work is her way of navigating between her two different cultural backgrounds, Irish American and Native American. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2021. Currently she is studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to get her Masters in Fiber and Material Studies.

chelseabighorn.com

A Case for Fringe 

Lily Lloyd Burkhalter is a French-American writer. She learned to sew in Cameroon and to weave in Chicago. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She is working on an essay collection and a novel that explore the intersection of text and textiles. 

Kasai Velvets from the Kingdom of Kuba 

My name is Royce Cottingham and I’m an undergraduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’m a fourth year and will be graduating with a BFA in textiles. The past two and half years at this school I have worked almost exclusively in the Fibers and Material Studies department. I was introduced to the heat press my second semester of my sophomore year and became obsessed with it. It’s a quick process to get your painted image onto fabric as well as aesthetically very pleasing–– producing wonderful variations of color.

Painting on Fabric with the Heat Press

Sofia is a visual artist from Mexico City, based in Chicago. 

Her work is composed primarily about process and experimentation, about accentuating the unperceivable by amplifying the sensorial. Constantly looking for new tactilities through materials like beeswax, natural fibers, found objects, and glass. In 2016 she lived with the community of woman weavers Jiñi Ñuu of San Juan Colorado in the Oaxaca Mixteca where she documented their process and daily rituals while investigating Zapotec roots. Sofia’s work has evolved through a decade of intimate investigation in which she seeks to honor prehistorical processes, symbolisms and the historial cosmologies of the lands she moves through. She pays homage to material, nature and cultural relationships of the past and present.

www.sofiafernandezdiaz.com

Woman Weaver Warriors and The Backstrap Loom

Delaina is a visual artist studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work explores pattern, femininity, collage and textiles. Most recently she has been making work around femininity and coming of age in evangelicalism/purity culture. She draws inspiration from daily walks, her lived experience growing up in the rural Midwest, and collecting objects and stories. 

She lives in Chicago with her husband and their dog, Oskee. 

www.delainadoshi.com

Sari Stories: Exploring the Culture of My New Family Through Textile Research

The Ease of Green

Margaret Dugger is an artist from North Carolina currently based in Chicago. She is currently pursuing her undergraduate degree at SAIC, usually working in the Fiber and Material Studies department. Using weaving and needlework, she explores themes of absence, loss, and the everyday experiences. Originally trained as a professional hand-weaver, this class offered a lot of excitement in the opportunity to learn from a community of textiles from all over the world. 

Following the Thread Lines 

Rafael Luiz Gonçalves is a Brazilian sculptor graduating from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program with an emphasis in Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is influenced by Architecture, Interiority, and Horror. Recently he has been accepted into the University of Illinois-Chicago Masters of Art History Program and will focus on researching and writing about the intersection of Architecture Theory and History, Culture, and Horror.

www.rlgon.com

Nexus 

Lydia Harder is a sculptor and textile artist currently living and working in Chicago, IL. Her work takes root in the investigation into the ritual elements and semiotics of domestic culture and dress. Often taking the form of a button up, a quilt, an everyday item; her work strives to seek out the histories that form these objects as well as the functions that turn them into symbols of beauty and culture both on a micro and macro scale. Utilizing practices of sewing, weaving, dyeing, sound, and image creation she is able to draw attention to the foundational as well as sentimental nature of objecthood and its link with living memory.

lydiaharder.com

To Leave a Mark, to Share a Memory

Lily Homer (b. Chicago) is a multi-media artist exploring issues of disillusionment, contradiction, Jewish diaspora, and absurdity. She uses embroidery, welding, lacemaking, animation, collage, and crochet to create models of potential space, which oscillate between representational and experiential, between line and form. Homer brings her family history of craftsmanship, such as textiles, jewelry, and furniture manufacturing, into her work. Through fibrous, pliable materials like thread, steel wire, rope, and fabric, she develops a visual language for her own experiences with anxiety, irrationality, and hope.

www.lilyhomer.com

Yixin (Abi) Li is a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she focuses on fiber and material studies, and Jacquard weaving. She is interested in making compositions with material and cultural content. In her Jacquard works, she is interested in the digital flux, noise and the obscurity of digital vs. analog communication. For her, making work is about updating her state of mind and emotions by putting them into a physical form of existence.

Ambiguity, Fuzziness and Haziness: The Quietness of Bast Fiber ––  a Humble Material with Lots to Say

Kate Morrick is a visual artist and writer based out of Chicago, Illinois.  She is currently an M.F.A. candidate in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she attends as a recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship award.  She received her B.S. in Textile and Apparel Design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and A.A.S. in Textile Development and Marketing from the Fashion Institute of Technology.  She has held numerous roles in Fabric Research and Development for prominent fashion houses in New York City specializing in sustainable and artisanal production.  Her work explores epistemological and ontological questioning pertaining to psychological affect within the context of late-capitalism and the postmodern era.  Through non-woven textile techniques like paper-making, felting, and bonding, her work manifests itself in sculpture, print, and installation as she attempts to reify obscure affective amalgamations as concrete sites for communal problem solving and healing. 

www.katemorrick.com

Cultivating White Clouds: Felt Mantle, Afghanistan 

Lydia Abigail Mudge is an undergraduate student in their senior year at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. They specialize in textiles with a heavy emphasis on knitting, spinning and tapestry weaving. They hope to use these skills in their post graduation exploration of historic textile research and recreation through experimental archaeology.  They are currently in the application process for a Fulbright grant with which they intend to travel to Norway to research their rich textile history. When not engaging with the historical aspects of fiber, they create protest pieces concerning environmental destruction, mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples, Black Lives Matter, reproductive rights, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Outside of fiber, their interests include writing fiction and communal storytelling with their friends using the tabletop role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. 

Following the Threads: Finding the Culture of Origin by Analyzing Motif and Form

Cindy Pan, born in Beijing, China. In 2021 entered MICA in Fiber and illustration double major. She transferred to SAIC after one and half years of study in MICA  to continue her BFA program in both Fiber and Sculpture. Cindy plays the role of a narrator in her artistic creations.

More info: Ig:  @yanqing_cindy 

灰缬--Huixie: SHAPE, PASTE & DYE 

Lee Miko Romero is an interdisciplinary artist from the Bay Area, living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Their work emerges from a drawing practice centered on depictions of animal behavior and knotted forms as personal reflections on connection and transformation. Through repetition of threads, tangles, and molting creatures, melding masses become netted blankets of comfort and protection. Considering knots and their utility, as well as cultural significance and symbolism. Thinking of tangles as a result of neglect or failure, as well as something that can be undone and transformed. 

leemikoromero.com

Knots, Tangles, and the Ways We Make Connections 

Erin Sugg is a Chicago-based visual artist primarily working in fiber art, specifically quilting and soft sculpture. Much of her work is inspired by rocks and the geometry of nature, leading her to explore hardness through softness. Sustainability is important to her work. All fabrics she uses are second-hand, either donated by friends and family or purchased from strangers. She is currently a third-year undergraduate studying Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She intends to pursue a pathway to a  career in textile conservation after graduation. This summer, she is excited to be completing a curatorial internship in collections care at the Naper Settlement in Naperville, IL.

https://erinsugg.weebly.com/ 

Khayamiya:  More Than Canvas

Textured Thinking: Fiber Renderings of Spaces 

Ximena Villalobos Mares is an undergraduate soon to receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in the Fiber and Material Studies from the Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in the history and the technique of dying as well as fiber objects of cultural identity. 

Oh, I can do that–that’s easy! How I attempted to remake a cultural garment with years of history in a month.

Camilla is a fiber artist expecting to receive her BFA in 2025 from SAIC. She explores the relationships between people and between people and the environment with practices of reuse that acknowledge and work with materiality. Her processes of material collection and manipulation discuss grief, loss, love, and restoration. 

Some of Camilla’s work can be found here: @cam_wson.art on Instagram.

SCRAPWORK, LABOR, ENVIRONMENTALISM & REVOLUTION: Selected Traditions of Reuse in Japan and Korea

Carina Yepez is a 2021 MFA candidate in Fiber & Material Studies, native to Chicago, Illinois with roots from Guanajuato, Mexico. She is dedicated to exploring the patterns of matriarchy and the quilted narrative of Chicago migrants.  Through sewing, she explores the techniques of domesticity and crafting expressions through her familial stories with a heart focused on healing ancestral trauma;  sewing and layering through appliqué to honor her culture through the floral arrangements of her quilts.  

www.carinayepez.com

QUECHQUéMITL (La Mañanita): A pre-cuauhtémoc symbol of resistance from ancient to modern times

Sitong Yin is an interdisciplinary visual artist, rooted in fiber & textile but also exploring and cooperating with videos, performances and installations. Her works draw inspiration from natural materials and phenomenons, inviting and translating elements like texture and landscape in her arts to explore the ambiguous and poetic space in-between endless searching for meanings and nihilism. Her works are also inspired by Chinese landscape painting and Chinese classical philosophies. 

Sitong is from Shenzhen, China. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, as a MFA candidate in the Fiber & Material Studies Program of the School of the Art institute of Chicago. 

https://www.yinsitongarts.com

Du-jinsheng Brocade: Weaving the Modern Chinese History 

Alson Zhao (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA 2021) is from Yunnan, China. Finding inspiration from structures, production and patterns of textiles, poetry and mythology, he experiments by interlacing the two mediums of printmaking and experimental film in his recent work.

Every Mola is a Word

Rivers Qinnan Zhu is a visual artist whose works include textile techniques such as weaving and lace-making, as also drawing, sculptures, and other mix-media. She values patient slow-process in craft, the presence of sustainability; and confronts issues in her personal silenced family history. Over the last two years, her current studio practice has been exploring the sense of displacement of her family and floating identity through zooming and subverting everyday life objects and moments.

Rivers was born in Hangzhou, China, and came to the United States to pursue her education at 15 years old. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, with her two kids(cats), ChowChow Zhu and KnowKnow Ossie Zhu. She is an MFA candidate in Fiber & Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.